


Doom Days

by hvllanders



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: (eventually bc we're not there yet hehe), Angst, BAMF Michelle Jones, Blood, Broken Bones, College, College!Peter, Eating Disorders, F/M, Getting Back Together, POV Michelle Jones, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Spider-Man: Far From Home, Protective Michelle Jones, Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie), Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie) Spoilers, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-07-10 04:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19900144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hvllanders/pseuds/hvllanders
Summary: **FAR FROM HOME SPOILERS**MJ lives in a state of being perpetually unsurprised.But nothing can prepare her for the crackle of a giant tv, declaring Spider-Man as the actual cause of Mysterio’s death. And, even worse, the words Peter Parker uttered in the same sentence as Spider-Man.In the fallout, MJ struggles to find her place in this strange new world, and one thing is for certain: her and Peter are not meant to be together. Fate, however, works in funny ways, and she finds herself drawn to Peter again and again, despite the odds. This time, she's determined to fix things.





	1. Genesis

Many times, people were surprised at just how good she was at _watching_.

It was almost unnerving, the way she could sit, still as a snake, and just observe the world for hours, until she was sure she knew it inside and out. It might have made her a good people-person in a different life- she certainly knew every surrounding person’s individual quirks and preferences. But in this incarnation of self, MJ was nothing more than that- an observer. When it came to the people-person part, she fell embarrassingly short.

Maybe it was because no one bothered to understand the why. She didn’t observe people because she wanted to manipulate them later or even so that she could know them better. She observed and deduced and calculated the world around her because it made her feel safe. If she figured everything out two steps ahead of time, she had time to plan her next move. She enjoyed this position of power.

MJ lived in a state of being perpetually unsurprised.

But nothing could have prepared her for the crackle of a giant tv, declaring Spider-Man as the actual cause of Mysterio’s death. And, even worse, the words _Peter Parker_ uttered in the same sentence as _Spider-Man_.

Though there was the usual throng of people in the crowded New York streets, for several moments after the broadcast there was nothing but silence.

MJ felt the shock travel up her body before her mind could process what happened. It was as though someone had just punched her in the gut; the wind knocked out of her, gasping for air. She hadn’t seen this coming. A tingling started in her fingers and toes, rushing blood up to flush her chest.

Everything moved in slow motion. There was an infinite length of time for her to consider the situation, to think of a way out, to use her superior skills of observation and deduction to construct a solution instead of just standing in one place. But she was frozen, her only, stupid thought: _Oh no._

The world came roaring back, this time at hyper-speed. She was jostled this way and that as a mounting wave of confusion and clamor swept through the crowd around her. Nothing dangerous, yet. Like her, no one was quite sure what to do or say.

Despite her skills of observation, MJ was only able to pull one voice from the crowd, a young boy who pointed upwards and shrieked, “He was right there!” She followed his gaze up to where Peter had been perched just moments earlier.

But if he had stayed through the entire video, or what his reaction had been, she couldn’t tell. He was already gone.

She stumbled her way westward, phone in hand, trying to figure out what to do. It felt as though she were in a daze. Was this real?

Lost, out of place in her own city, her only thought was finding Peter. Making sure he was safe. With trembling fingers, she dialed his number and held her breath, waiting. It went straight to voicemail. Stupid. Of course. She should have known he’d be smarter than to have his phone on for anyone to track. She just wished something, anything, could quell the twisting mass of anxiety swirling in her stomach. None of the streets looked familiar. Faces loomed before her, but she couldn’t tell who to trust and who to fight. She had been so wrong, so lulled into a false sense of security. How could she have missed that this was coming? Snippets of conversation tugged at her as she shoved her way to the subway station.

“- just a kid, right? I mean, seems a little crazy to me?”

“Kids do fucked up shit all the time. I’d believe it.”

“But Spider-Man helped my kid cross the street just the other week.”

“Peter Parker. Do I recognize that name?”

“Is he gonna have to register with that society now? The one that keeps track of people like him? Seems like he’s been in involved in some city-wide destruction, just like all those other ‘heroes’.”

This statement stopped MJ short, considering this person’s terrifying implications. “No,” she spluttered out. “He hadn’t done anything wrong.” But she melted back into the crowd before any surprised faces could turn her way. She didn’t know why it mattered to her that these people knew they were wrong. But it did.

Her apartment was quiet when she returned. With the hazy fingers of a sleepwalker, she undid the lock. Was all of this a dream? Would her parents return home from work and laugh about how the stock market was doing? Would one of her classmates ( _boyfriend_ , part of her brain reminded her, _he’s your boyfriend_ ) still be framed for murder?

A body smacked into her as she swung open the door.

Too stunned to scream, she stumbled forwards a few steps, trying to remember what to do in this situation. Run? Scream? Fight? She was moments away from whacking her assailant over the head with a nearby textbook when he gave a small sob.

Her hand paused, fingers hovering over the glossy book cover. “Peter?”

He was wrapped around her, arms pressed tightly into her neck, head on her shoulder, body melded against her own, as if he was cold and needed her body heat. His mask was off, but he was still in his red and black suit.

For a moment, she was frozen. They hadn’t been dating for very long at all. She wasn’t really used to what this whole girlfriend thing typically entailed. So, she said the only thing she could think to say in this type of situation, which was, “When wood frogs get really cold, they freeze solid for the winter. They wait until warm temperatures unthaw them, and then they live their lives like they weren’t just frozen solid.”

If Peter heard her, he didn’t give any indication other than squeezing closer. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, Idon’tknowwhattodo.”

“It’s…” She wanted so desperately to tell him it was okay, but it probably wasn’t. What was she supposed to tell him, then? What was she supposed to say?

He lurched back suddenly, looking at her with pleading eyes. “I didn’t do it.” His gaze was searching hers, anguished. “What the video said. I didn’t do any of it.” Tears welled, threatening to spill over.

“I know.” This she could be confident in telling him. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, “Maybe this will all blow over? They can…they can prove you were wronged or whatever. And then everything will go back to normal.”

“No.” He was taking another step backwards, out of reach of her arms. “No, I- MJ, he told everyone I’m Spider-Man.” He dropped his voice to a whisper, though it was a secret no more. “He said my name.”

“I know.” She sputtered out a long breath. “I know. And that sucks. But it’ll be okay, right? It’s not ideal. But you were planning on telling everyone eventually, right?”

“No!” His face paled further. “No, that was the whole point! I just…I just wanted to live a normal life and get to experience all the dumb things regular teenagers experience! And, sure, maybe that includes some web-slinging every so often. But I didn’t want everyone to know.” His face went cloudy. “I don’t know…I don’t know what this means now. People could target my family.” His eyes traced her face. “Where ever I go, I’ll always be Spider-Man. And he’s not the best person to be right now.”

He wasn’t wrong. But she couldn’t tell him that. He looked so scared. It was odd; she had never seen him as a fearful person. Back when she used to watch him and Ned in the lunchroom, she’d viewed him as impervious. Sure, he’d been a geek, and he’d gotten his lunch money stolen by Flash more than a few times, but he’d always taken obstacles in stride. Unstoppable. At the Washington Monument, she’d seen him be a hero for the first time, and she’d been too far away, on the ground, to see any fault. He was just a red and blue blur. Impervious. And even when she had seen him, truly seen him and known it was, indeed, him in that crazy suit, flipping around, he hadn’t looked like this. Fighting Mysterio, he had been scared and afraid. But he got back up every _freakin_ time he was knocked down.

This Peter, however, looked like he wanted to flee.

He reached out, tentatively taking MJ’s hand in his own. He didn’t drag his eyes up from the ground as he whispered. “Run away with me.”

“What?”

He must have misread her shock as incomprehension, because when he looked back up at her, it was with more gusto in his eyes. “Run away with me. We will…we will, I don’t know. We will go somewhere no one can find us. Until this all blows over, like you said. We’ll come back when the world has forgotten who Spider-Man is, and everyone will stay safe.” His face hardened in resolve. “No one else will get hurt because of me.”

And he looked at her with such innocent belief, such misplaced trust, she almost said yes.

Almost.

“Peter.” Because that was all she could say.

He knew.

He deflated almost immediately, like a balloon, all the air rushing out of him at once. Crumpling under the weight of the world. He was carrying so much on his shoulders. But how to take it from him? She had no idea. She had no idea.

Her phone rang, shrill and jarring from her backpack, and they both jumped at the noise. She’d forgotten she’d turned her ringer on when she’d been trying to contact him. She and Peter were frozen, still as statues, and part of her wanted to let the phone keep ringing. Because while she knew, logically, there was no going back from this, no undoing what had already been destroyed, she also knew that right there, in that moment, they were safe. He was here and in front of her and okay. She couldn’t move. Something deep inside of her whispered that this moment would never come again.

“Were you serious?” she whispered above the phone’s insistent ringing. “About running away?”

He squinted at her, face contorted in a wild mask of hurt, indignation, and something else…resentment? She didn’t have time to overanalyze before he was reaching forward, puling the phone from the side pocket of her backpack. His face studied the number for a moment before he accepted the call.

“Hello?” He no longer sounded like a scared boy. “Happy?” He turned away from her as he spoke, shoulders hunched. Unreadable to her, on purpose, she knew. “Yes, I’ll come.” A few more terse nods, a glance her way. “I understand.”

The phone dropped away from his ear, and he passed it back over to her. “That was Happy. He said I should come back to my apartment. There’s…uh…some people there to question me.”

“Okay.” She felt awkward; estranged from him. Though their relationship (if you could even call it that) hadn’t been long by any means, rarely did she not feel like she could talk to him. In fact, he often felt like the only person she _was_ comfortable talking to.

“He said I should change.” His hands ran up and down the suit. “We don’t really know what’s going down and…”

“You’ll be less obvious in regular people clothes,” she finished. “Yeah.”

His face was crimson. “I left my backpack in the square, so…’

“You can borrow some of my clothes.” Why was she glowing red too?

“Thanks.”

She could feel the heat emanating from her cheeks. “Of course.”

She disappeared into her room, and was digging for a t-shirt, sweatpants in hand, excuse ready on her lips about why he should bring her along with him as his personal bodyguard, when there was a series of loud thumps and a muffled yell from the living room.

The sinister click of a gun sounded, and the careful words, “Mr. Parker, we need to have a chat at your residence.”

She rushed back towards Peter, but it was already too late. The window was open, drapes fluttering in the breeze, Spider-Man nowhere in sight.

MJ prided herself on her ability to compartmentalize. For instance, as she rode the train to Peter’s apartment, she concentrated on feeling absolutely nothing at all. And she was mostly successful.

The trick was to remove the emotion, remove the sense of self. View situations objectively- that was how you controlled them. Peter had been taken. She didn’t know by whom or what. She didn’t know if he was safe. She did know that she had to get to his apartment.

She did know that Peter was more powerful with her by his side.

With wary eyes, she watched the train around her, twisting fingers in the strings of her jacket. People were chattering to one another left and right; the buzz was palpable in the air. Peter’s face was posted on news outlets, on screens, on social media. What had happened to him? What would she do if-

No.

She was compartmentalizing.

She was a regular girl, riding a regular train, on her way to visit her totally regular boyfriend. Nothing nifty or special about it.

So, she squared her shoulders, put her head back against the rattling subway car, and ignored the world.

If she hadn’t been so angry about the whole situation, maybe she would have been more careful. If she hadn’t been so scared, maybe she would have listened as she stomped down the hall to his apartment. If she hadn’t been so determined to find him, to help him, maybe she would have hesitated with her hand on the door knob. If she hadn’t been so caught up in it all, so confused, so thrown off her game, maybe she wouldn’t have busted into the Parker residence, t-shirt and sweatpants still clutched in her hand, ready to save the world. Maybe she wouldn’t have found a man with a gun. Maybe it wouldn’t have been pointed directly at her face.

“Don’t move,” he growled.

She forced a smile. “Yeah. Not planning on it.” And there was the sass, the oh-so-charming-wit, still there above it all, despite the fact her insides had melted into slime seconds previous.

May and Peter were sitting side by side on the couch. If she squinted, maybe she could pretend they were just sitting down for some quality time together, or to watch a new tv show. But she definitely would have to forgo her glasses to not take in their body language, their expressions. They were sitting ramrod straight, Peter’s face tomato red and splotchy, May’s drained of all color. While they weren’t moving, MJ could see May’s hand wrapped tightly around Peter’s.

Happy stood in front of them, arms crossed, glaring at a man pacing the area in front of the tv. The unknown man was smart looking and seemed unruffled by the whole affair, dressed in a sharp suit that matched his calculating eyes. He met MJ’s gaze as she stared, but she refused to look away. With a flicker of his hand, the henchman nudged MJ further into the room, gun pressed against the small of her back, before shutting the door.

Great. Now they were all trapped.

“You can let her leave.” Happy looked merely disgruntled by the entire affair, but MJ swore she saw a moment of apprehension flash across his features. She also didn’t miss the pointed look he threw her way. “She’s not a part of any of this. She walked into the wrong apartment.”

But, because she was a stubborn fool, she had no choice but to answer, “No, I didn’t.”

The man in the suit gave a tight smile. “The girl stays here.”

Happy threw up an exasperated hand. “So, this is how the government runs things, Ross? You snatch minors for custody from apartment windows and force random children to stay for questioning?”

The suited man, Ross, merely raised an eyebrow at this. His henchman shifted so his back was to MJ, but his body blocked further entry into the apartment.

Happy’s frown deepened. “What exactly are you planning here? To indict a seventeen-year-old with murder? Bring him in for further mutant ‘testing’ without probable cause?”

Peter flinched at these words, and May’s hand squeezed tighter around him. The henchman noticed this movement, hand straying to his gun. Right. He was watching them closely. This was serious. There would be little that Peter could do to get out of this situation without guns being fired.

“Listen.” Ross spread his hands wide, a gesture of reasonability. “I don’t know what else you want me to do, Hogan. We got solid, hardcore evidence that Stark was hiding a mutant under our noses for years, and, on top of that, he could be dangerous. We haven’t said he _is_ dangerous-” he said quickly, before Happy could open his mouth to retort, “but we have reason to believe he _could be_. That means we take action.”

MJ didn’t know what this ‘taking action’ meant. But she knew Peter’s identity had been kept secret for a reason. And she also knew whatever tricks Mysterio had up his sleeve, they hadn’t stopped after his death. There was a good chance if Peter got taken into custody, he would be convicted of murder.

She wouldn’t let that happen. There had to be something she could do. What was near her? What was within her reach?

“Can’t you at least take him to a regular police station?” May was asking. “He’s just a kid, can’t you let him stay with one of us until…until you have more reason to suspect he even did these awful things?”

There was the kitchen to her left, that had better weapons. A knife block next to the fridge looked especially appealing, but there was no way to get far into the kitchen without someone seeing her and getting suspicious. No. She would have to go for something closer. But what?

“Unfortunately, ma’am,” (and MJ couldn’t help but hear the way he sneered _ma’am_ ) “because he is a suspected mutant with powers, he’s classified as a Type A Highly Dangerous suspect. We’re going to have to take him with us and hold him in special custody.”

Happy grunted disapproval at that, and MJ shuddered to think what ‘special custody’ meant. “Don’t you need some kind of papers or documentation or something?”

Her only other option was to go to her right, where a small end table stood near her arm. Initially, she wasn’t sure it contained anything of consequence. Some keys, a few pennies and a dime, a picture of Peter and May atop a ferris wheel. But-

“If we believe there is a true emergency, a threat to public safety, we have the power to act first and ask questions later.”

On the table was a lamp. Gold base. Looked hefty.

Happy gave a disbelieving chuff. “Seems a little hypocritical, given your legislative history.”

“We need to go,” Ross told the henchman, motioning to Peter.

She needed to act.

Happy took a step towards Ross, and the henchman moved to copy his movement. Now or never.

MJ took a deep breath.

She dove for the lamp.

In the movies, what happened next would have come in flashes. So fast and chaotic that nothing would be intelligible expect the fighting. Or perhaps it would have been in slow motion, crawling along at a snail’s pace. Every moment, each grunt, each tear, each impact, exposed in raw detail.

However, in real life, it was at perfectly normal speed that Michelle Jones picked up the lamp, ripped it out of the wall, and bashed it over the head of the henchman.

For a moment, nothing incredible happened. The henchman stumbled forward, letting out a surprised yelp. MJ locked eyes with Peter, and screamed, as loud as she could, “RUN!”

And that’s when the movie-style flashing started.

The sharp scream of gunfire. White, hot pain sparking through her leg. Grunts. Bodies thudding against wood flooring. Peter, flying through the air, webshooters in tow. No. No. He wasn’t supposed to fight. He was supposed to _leave_.

Yelling. Yelling. The jarring impact of bodies smacking against one another, against the walls.

And then it was over.

Ross and his henchman, unconscious. Webbed up, back to back.

Peter had done it. They had done it.

Her leg throbbed with a dogged kind of persistence now. The coppery taste of adrenaline was retreating from her tongue, and her calf promised hell to pay the moment it wore off. Peter’s hazy figure danced in and out of the black spots blossoming in her vision. He was trembling, shaking all over, and Happy was trying to shove him and May out the door.

“MJ!” His face blanched as he took in all the blood. Oh. Yeah. She was sitting in a fair amount of blood. Her fingers twitched, and she focused on getting them to reach towards him. They just weren’t paying attention to her at the moment.

Peter took a step in her direction, but Happy pushed him, not too gently, backwards. “You take May, and you go where I told you! I’ll make sure she’s okay.” And still, when he hesitated, Happy stepped in front of MJ, blocking her view. “Peter.” His voice was dangerously low, dangerously scared. “Go. Now.”

She didn’t see Peter and May stumble from the apartment, quiet and afraid, just heard the door rattle shut behind them. What had she done?

Happy turned back to her and sighed, running a hand over his face. Just for a moment, there was a glimpse of weakness, of exhaustion. But all of that wiped away as he turned his attention to her. “We’re gonna get you patched up, alright?”

She nodded, or at least, she tried to nod. Her bodily capacities weren’t firing on all cylinders.

“Nice work there.” His face was set with a strange kind of pride.

But she wasn’t interested in accolades. The black spots were dominating her vision now, but she was determined to ask, she needed to know. “What’s going to happen to Peter?”

Happy murmured something above her, and she tried to pretend it sounded reassuring. Whatever it was, though, she had no way of knowing before the black spots overwhelmed her, and she closed her eyes.

When she woke up from a drug-induced sleep, she was in some fancy medical facility with no bullet in her leg and her tearful mother was there to hold her hand and she was told not to worry, that they had the entire lamp-bashing situation under control and she would be released shortly and everything would return to normal. There was plenty to say about how her name would be cleared from all legal records and how she was a hero and how they had the best lawyers in the world working on making sure she had a great senior year of high school.

On the subject of Peter, however, no one had many words.

One night, because she was desperate and stupid and lonely and scared, she called him from the phone next to her hospital bed. It was quite possibly the foolish and least compartmentalized action she had ever taken, but she had to do it. She had to type in those numbers, put the phone up to her ear, hold her breath, and wait.

It went straight to a dial tone. The number was no longer in service. She didn’t know what she had been expecting.

The first and only mention of Peter came during her discharge, when, after signing what felt like a thousand and five documents, a lawyer just oh-so-casually pulled her aside and said, “It’s probably best that you never try and contact Mr. Parker or associates again.”

And MJ was nothing if not truthful to her word. And she was nothing if not careful when it came to Peter Parker.

So, she never called again. She didn’t text or write or communicate. She didn’t search through the records or try and hack into databases to try and find him. She didn’t haunt his apartment or lurk by his old locker. In fact, after a while, the kind of tragic hole he left behind became a new sort of normal. She stopped hoping or dreaming or even thinking about that stupid boy with curly hair and a wardrobe full of bad science puns because if she knew one thing for certain in this tumultuous world it was this:

She would never see Happy, or May, or Peter Parker again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> or will she??? ;)
> 
> i couldn't help myself- if there's one thing i love, it's writing post-movie fics where i make up something angsty that happens next. also these two dorks just grabbed my heart, so here's my take on post-ffh, petermj style.
> 
> lmk what you think in the comments below or drop a kudos if ya feel like it <3 i love you all dearly and can't wait to take a new journey together :)


	2. Aftermath

_Michelle Jones_

_Dr. Wheeler_

_POLI 245_

_23 July 2026_

_Long Term Solutions to Homelessness and Why All the Current Plans are Stupid_

_Time is weird._

_It moves and it doesn’t; stalls and starts in splutters. Heals and re-opens wounds. Though we are conspicuously moving forward, it often feels as though we’re merely in loop, spinning around and around. The same vices, the same problems, the same highs and the same lows. Never really moving forward, even if the minute hand says we are._

_The thing aboutttttttttttttttttt_

“Michelle?”

“Huh?” She startled, coming dangerously close to whacking her coffee off the café table- it was only fate that saved hot liquid from spilling all over her laptop.

Across the table, Devin smiled. “I didn’t mean to scare you so bad.”

“It’s fine.” Getting lost in her thoughts so completely was disorienting. It was as though her brain could hold hundreds of ideas and shuffle through them all at once, but when it came to reality, everything was a blur.

“Shouldn’t we get going soon? I thought you said that person was coming to look at our apartment?”

She frowned, still in another world. “What? When did I say that?”

“Like, I don’t know, yesterday afternoon when we were getting Chipotle?”

“Oh. Yeah.” It was slowly coming back to her. She glanced at her phone messages. “Someone named Ben’s coming to check out the room at 4:30.”

Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, they were looking for a new person to lease the third bedroom in their apartment. Their old roommate had been dating Devin (the third bedroom necessary to hide the relationship from homophobic parents which was a whole _other_ story) and they’d broken up very publicly and very nastily, so they now had an empty bedroom. Michelle wasn’t looking forward to introducing a new person into her already limited sphere of influence, but it had to be done. She hadn’t done the breaking up, but she got to deal with the cleaning up.

“What were you working on so intently?”

“I was attempting to write an intro for my political change class.” She looked down at her lukewarm coffee. “It’s due Friday, and it’s pretty unintelligible so far.”

“I’m sure you’ll work something out.” He smiled thinly, as though he had all the confidence in the world in her abilities, and continued to scroll absentmindedly through his phone. “You know, someone on Twitter was saying something about how coffee can actually stunt brain productivity.”

“You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.” MJ hadn’t been a coffee drinker before she went to college. She preferred the aesthetic of tea, in all honesty. She drank coffee more out of necessity- a straight shot of caffeine to the veins.

“Touché.” Devin shrugged. “But you’re the one who wanted to take classes during summer- aka the _least_ productive time of year- so I don’t think you can complain.”

“Hmmm.” She stared at her computer, willing words to come to her. But whatever creative energies had been flowing a few minutes before were long gone. She didn’t even know what she had been trying to say.

“Hey, check this out.” Devin pushed his phone over to her. “London’s finally finishing repairs on that bridge for all the damage Spider-Man did. Took them long enough, huh?”

“Oh.” She stared blankly at the article, seeing walls of text but not reading. She knew what it would say, anyway. Spider-Man wreaked havoc on several countries as a severe terrorist threat. He had fled custody. The repercussions from his actions were still being experienced today.

“Michelle? Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, and focused on rearranging her face into something passably normal. Rubbing fingers along the handle of her coffee (it was really somewhat cute- the mug was the face of a cat and the handle was its tail), she fished for words. “Sorry, I just…” But she didn’t know what else to say.

And here was the issue Michelle ran into again and again and again, so much so it would be laughable if it wasn’t goddamn pathetic: She was friends with Devin for convenience. And being friends for convenience meant he couldn’t know anything about Spider-Man, let alone Peter Parker.

Not that Devin wasn’t nice, because he was. And not that Devin was the kind of person who deserved a shitty, half-baked friendship, because he didn’t. But Devin was the type that took people under his wing and didn’t ask any further questions. He enjoyed coffee dates and Mario Kart tournaments, and his only real requirement for being friends was that you occasionally laughed at his jokes. They had spent a glorious two semesters together at ESU and so far, MJ had only had to divulge half-truths about her personal life to keep their friendship going. And that was just what she needed.

So, she pulled herself together because she wasn’t MJ here, she was Michelle Jones, dammit, and Michelle Jones did not break down into an uncalled-for sobbing fest in the middle of a New York coffee shop for no goddamn reason. She forced a smile, “Sorry, I’m just really worried about this paper. That’s crazy though. How long has it been?”

His eyes scanned the article. “Two years, I think?”

And she nodded as though she, too, had forgotten all the details.

It was strange to think it had already been that long. But as she had previously discovered- time was weird. She’d lost five years of her life already; gone in the blink of an eye as she watched her torso crumble to ash. Devin had been born in 2006, she in 2001, but he had turned nineteen before her. She still had several weeks to go, even though she had been born five years earlier. What did that mean?

Sometimes the two years she’d been without Peter felt like nothing. She didn’t think about him or speak about him or see reminders of him wherever she walked. She’d carved new paths into the city they’d once shared. Some part of her whispered she was healing.

But, then again, some days it was all she could do not to dream about them both at ESU together, walking hand in hand, weighed down with laptops and textbooks. He would have bought her tea just so she could hold it in her hands, just for the aesthetic. She would have smiled wider than she could imagine smiling now, because he was so foolishly goofy, but he was _her_ foolishly goofy boyfriend.

Sometimes she felt like she was finally knitting her life back together, but always, inevitably, somehow, Peter Parker would slip back in and tug on a string, and the entire thing would unravel all over again.

**Two years ago,** she’d been a scared little girl.

She’d stare at her ceiling at night, unable to fall asleep. She couldn’t turn her thoughts off even if she tried.

It had been odd, of course, to find out Peter was Spider-Man. But it was a manageable discovery. Having the world find out he was Spider-Man, however, put her private life into chaos. She had _chosen_ to bring Peter into her life despite knowing the damage he might bring with him. She hadn’t invited this destruction.

And the worst part of it all was she would just lay there and lay there and the only thing she could think to do would be to pick up her phone and text Peter because she just needed to _talk_ with somebody about it all.

And he never replied.

She tried not to take it personally. Looking at the situation logically, she knew he couldn’t contact her. He had been whisked away. Where, she had no clue. But no prior means of communication would connect her to him. All records of Peter Parker and his whereabouts had been hastily redacted. So, in all probability, it wasn’t that he was ignoring her texts, he just wasn’t allowed to respond. Or, even more likely, he didn’t even have access to her number anymore.

So, MJ settled down into a life without Peter Parker. (Maybe settled wasn’t the right word. It was more of a rattling around in a hole she no longer fit). She entered senior year of high school amidst whispers and stolen glances. Back when the story first broke, a gaggle of reporters gathered outside of Midtown every day for a month. They weren’t allowed through the gates, but it was unnerving all the same; their reaching hands, flashing lights, the desperate look in their eyes. _How does it feel, having a student your age accused of murder? Was Peter Parker ever aggressive to you? Did you know he was Spider-Man?_

She didn’t quite know how to navigate the roaring chaos twisting inside of her yet- how to stop turning to tell Peter a joke or how to combat the hollow ache of being known so fleetingly and briefly. But no one in the general public knew that she, Michelle Jones, had known or been acquainted with Peter Parker. So, she could just keep her head down and go in the back door and pretend the reporters didn’t exist.

But, despite her carefully cultivated status as untouchable outsider at Midtown, somehow everyone from everywhere wanted to talk to her about the previous nobody Peter Parker. She couldn’t walk through the halls without someone asking if it was all true; if he was really a terrorist hellbent on destroying humanity, if she had known if he was Spider-Man, if she was in on it all, if webs came out of his penis.

But MJ knew how to pull her chin up and her shoulders back and have that steely look in her eyes that dared anyone to come near her. And, after a few weeks of tittering by her sides, wondering just what _exactly_ the deal with that Peter Parker had been, they stopped. Their lives had changed very little, briefly electrified by the possibility of scandal within their midst, and most Midtown students found new roads and routes and paths to carve that didn’t involve Peter at all.

MJ was not quite as lucky, but she made do with what she could.

She still sat with Ned at lunch. They walked home together sometimes. She wished she could comfort him, but she had no idea how. She had always sucked at the emotional stuff. And Ned was a mess. A certified mess. Trembling constantly, all shaky and pale. Prone to breaking down in class unprompted. Whereas people occasionally found the gumption to approach MJ and ask the odd, “So, did you _know_?” everyone seemed to instinctually shy away from Ned.

And she was, of course, the most spectacular friend one could ask for during this time. One memorable moment, in which he left history to have a panic attack, she dragged her sorry butt out in the hallway to comfort him, and, with a soothing voice, she’d snapped, “It’s not like he’s dead, you know.”

And she’d never forget how he looked up at her, those hauntingly grief-filled eyes and said, “Isn’t he, though?”

She was sure in the moment she’d quipped something offensive back at him- the opposite of comfort. But later, on one of those nights where she was just staring staring up at the ceiling, the truth in his words echoed back. Sure, Peter may still be alive. He possibly, probably, hopefully was. But to MJ and Ned, to everyone who had loved Spider-Man and the boy he once was, he was gone, irrevocably gone. Gone with the ripped wound of an unexpected loss, the kind with jagged, unhealable edges.

Still, she couldn’t let go, she couldn’t not sit at the tv every night, pool a blanket around her chilly feet, and wait for news about Spider-Man.

At first, it was bad. The evidence against Peter was overwhelming; the compiled “footage” made her stomach church and fists clench. She understood, with every night, every new story, why he had needed to flee so desperately. Happy Hogan had never been a bigger hero in her eyes. If Ross had taken him, he would have been a dead man.

Eventually, the news reports began to fade. It became increasingly clear that wherever Spider-Man was, he wasn’t coming out anytime soon. The trail grew stale, not interesting enough to make sellable headlines. Rumors circulated of Ross stepping down, of the hunt for a villainous spider finally being over, and the grip around her heart loosened a little.

She wasn’t sure if it was blessing or a curse when the media stopped reporting on Spider-Man at all.

She expected to feel some kind of peace, some sense of closure. No one was talking about it anymore, no one wanted her to talk about it anymore, she could just move on. Try and forget it all happened.

But somehow it was all the more awful. She didn’t have to see his face on the news every day, but she also had no clue what the government or its subsidiaries were planning next. She didn’t have to see the WANTED posters everywhere, but she also was no longer certain he hadn’t been captured. She didn’t have to field questions like webs-for-semen. She didn’t have to field questions at all. There weren’t clips of him, swinging about, on the news anymore, he wasn’t featured on Midtown’s daily announcements, his face wasn’t staring at her from every corner of New York. It was as though he had faded from existence- left with a bang and then nothing more than a whimper. She had nothing left of him; not a news clip, not a poster, not even a question.

The world had forgotten Peter Parker.

**One year ago,** the world hadn’t yet forgotten Spider-Man. Most of New York, in fact, missed him dearly.

There were, of course, dissonant voices. The faction of “Supervillain Spidey” held steady in numbers, particularly in online conspiracy forums, and every so often a “Still on the hunt for Spider-Man?” story would break the news cycle. But on the whole, New York slipped back into its same, chaotically steady rhythm, albeit missing its finest neighborhood defender.

Spider-Man became an urban legend, a name to be invoked with reverence and regret. Two men, reading the morning newspaper at a café would mutter to each other, “If Spider-Man was here, I bet he could have stopped that theft at the flower shop. I can really picture him with a dozen bouquets in hand.” A mom would turn to another parent at a park, frowning, “Spider-Man used to walk my children home every day from the bus stop. Really helped them feel safe. I miss that kid.”

She often wanted to speak up, to chime in with, “I miss him too.” But she didn’t know how.

MJ saw her own, begrudging, fifteen minutes of fame. Somehow, on some Spidey support network, a video of her swinging with Peter had been released. Thus started a worldwide search for her face, concluding in a national news organization picking up the story. Somehow, the mystery girl swinging with Spider-Man was really the story America wanted to watch as they sat down with their coffee in the morning. But much as she despised her entire, nonconsensual involvement in the story, MJ found she really couldn’t blame them. The news had enough shit to broadcast. Searching for Spider-Man’s supposed ‘mystery girl’ was at least a little lighter fare.

Of course, eventually someone figured out Michelle Jones was the girl in the video, and MJ found herself glad no public videos of her with Peter existed. Because though reporters called her and emailed her and followed her to work, to school, to her home, their questions were always centered around Spider-Man. What was it like to swing with Spider-Man? _Terrifying._ How did she feel, flying one hundred feet above New York, wrapped in Spider-Man’s arms? _Surprisingly free from toxic masculinity._ How were Spider-Man’s webshooters? _Fucking spectacular._

Not one person asked her about Peter Parker, and for that she was grateful. Because it was Spider-Man in the video, and Spider-Man in the suit. Peter Parker still seemed a completely different person in her mind. One she hadn’t yet merged together with Spider-Man, and one she didn’t know she ever would.

But there was one question she just couldn’t seem to shake, despite her quippy answers, despite her refusal to go on NBC, despite her lofty, ‘above it all’ attitude she had nearly perfected. And it came from a little, wide-eyed boy who stopped her on the street one day and asked, completely seriously, “What was it like to date Spider-Man?”

And she realized she had absolutely no idea.

**Sixth months ago,** her and Ned stopped speaking.

It had been a gradual, terrible sort of thing. They’d tried so hard. She was pretty sure they had. But it turned out losing Peter was a hammer smashing them in two. He hadn’t been the glue holding them together, but he had broken them in two disparate directions, and in the aftermath, they didn’t fit into one the same way they used to.

When she was thinking logically, MJ liked to believe it was the suddenness of it all. One day they were laughing together about some stupid Star Wars fanfiction, the next her and Ned were hand and hand as they watched mysterious movers cart everything out of the Parker’s apartment.

When she wasn’t thinking logically, something inside of her whispered that they would have fallen apart anyways. It was only a matter of time.

Ned told her he never heard from Peter. The last text he received was timestamped ten minutes before the Mysterio broadcast: _see you laterrrrrrrrr_. Ned didn’t get a goodbye, he didn’t get an explanation, he didn’t even get a warning. Just a meaningless text, a thousand unanswered questions.

As for herself, MJ found a sweatshirt of Peter’s stuffed in her backpack when she got home from school one day, maybe five months or so after his disappearance. She had no clue how she received it, and she didn’t bother questioning. Just put it on, laughed at the stupid stupid science pun emblazoned across the chest, and pretend she didn’t sleep in it nearly every night.

Ned cried when he found out she received something. She understood his pain all too well, knew the sting of being forgotten by a friend, feeling lesser and lost. But she knew the truth- Peter would never risk Ned’s safety by giving him something forbidden. Ever.

Maybe the sweatshirt had been the beginning of the end.

MJ got into college, moved to an apartment closer to ESU’s campus, got accepted as a Human Rights major. Ned had also gone to ESU, both of them worked hard, treading water, trying to make the mounting tension between them fade. They ate together in the dining hall and reserved rooms in the library to study for midterms. But he was crumbling into nothingness and she was rising, building herself taller than a skyscraper, impenetrable, and they could both see the growing chasm between.

By this time, the protests to bring justice for Spider-Man had died down. The clamor was over, had _been_ over, and MJ watched as, over the course of her freshman year, employee after former employee of Stark Industries rose to governmental office. She could practically smell corruption on their over-priced cologne, but it didn’t matter. Any dissenting voices, particularly those speaking in support of a certain arachnid teen were squashed, sometimes violently. Nobody seemed to care enough to say anything.

When she mentioned this to Ned, he merely shrugged, proving her point.

She snapped at him, said something nasty. There were tears in his eyes as he’d gotten up and left, and she felt, appropriately, like an ass. Because of course this was all about her.

After that they’d texted, still hung out a few times. But the space between them grew and grew until it seemed impassable. They were both grieving in separate orbits, lost without their common planetational pull.

Eventually he texted “hey” and she hadn’t replied back. Or she texted “hey” and he hadn’t replied back. She couldn’t remember which was which.

It didn’t matter.

**Three months ago,** officials found Spider-Man’s body.

Burned to a crisp in an old warehouse. Well, previous warehouse. The building and Spider-Man were both ashes now. She’d seen the footage on YouTube: a bucket instead of a body bag.

She didn’t know if it was real or fake.

Logically, she knew it was fake. If they hadn’t found him for nearly two years, he wouldn’t be found. The people on his team, the people Stark had left him, they were too good. They would never let this happen.

And yet, a bucket of ashes identified as Peter Parker.

She had been so sure this would spiral the media back up into a frenzy again, but outlets remained surprisingly tight-lipped. She smelled government censorship, but no one wanted to hear that.

So, all cries of outrage or public mourning were kept very hush hush, and it was just by random chance, as she was making her way home from a night class and trying oh-so-hard to keep it all together, she happened to bump into a girl carrying a bunch of flowers inviting her to Spider-Man’s funeral.

She figured she’d tag along. She had reading to do for class, but she might as well see. It was all very casual. Because it was fake. She knew it had to be fake.

The gathering was large, larger than she’d been expecting after years of media abuse. A bunch of New Yorker’s huddled together at a cemetery, a plethora of candles and flowers and red-and-blue masks draped over a grave. It was marked Peter Parker. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real.

The girl she’d walked with sobbed loudly as she placed her flowers. “It’s just…it all so sad.”

“Get over yourself,” MJ spat back.

She could be such a bitch sometimes.

She called Ned and he didn’t pick up, so MJ did the only sensible thing she could do in the moment which was to go and dig through her closet and put on his sweatshirt and cry through her history reading.

And so, two years later, Michelle stood, on the precipice of her sophomore year, and she had finally, _finally_ built a life which had nothing to do with Peter Parker. She didn’t talk with anyone from Midtown, and the general public had long since stopped associating her with Spider-Man, let alone Peter. She was just a normal, if distant, eighteen almost nineteen-year-old college student who ostensibly had friends and did her work in class and would one day become a person who fought for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. She got good grades and could cook ramen in microwaves, and she laughed and smiled enough that people didn’t get suspicious. Things were far from perfect, but they were finally in a place approaching normal.

And normal meant doing things like finding roommates. Even if she desperately did not want to meet someone new.

Devin seemed unaffected by it all, lounging on their apartment couch, where they were waiting for Ben to show. “What exactly are we looking for in our roommate-to-be?”

Michelle snorted. “Someone who pays rent on time and doesn’t leave a gigantic mess around.”

“I was kinda hoping for someone at least a seven on the hotness scale, maybe a cute dog they want to move in with as well…”

She forced a laugh, though her stomach was churning. Why was she so riddled with anxiety over meeting a stupid potential roommate? “That’s the standard we’re holding people to?”

“I’m just saying it would be nice.”

But she was quickly shushing him. “That must be them at the door. I heard knocking.”

“Okay, I’m ready.” Devin mimed getting out a pen and notepad as Michelle rolled her eyes.

She didn’t know why she felt so nervous getting up to answer the door. _You’ll be fine_ , she coached herself, _just take it down like fifty notches. More Michelle, less MJ._ Smile, shoulders back, face relaxed, just open the door, say some words, don’t fuck it all, “Hey, you must be Ben.”

But standing in front of her was not Ben. He was not Ben at all. He was hope and he was confusion and he was heartache and he was years of anxiety and he was impossible. He was impossible.

Something was short circuiting in her brain. She spluttered, “I don’t understand.”

“I-”

She had been away from his face too long to read if he was also surprised by this encounter, but before she could analyze the situation, decide whether to slap or hug him, Devin waved from the couch. “Hey! Ben! You’re gonna love it here!”

And it was Peter Parker who looked at her with those stupid, tender eyes, and asked, “Can I come in?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eeeeeeep, you know I couldn't keep them apart forever :)))) But what will they do now??
> 
> Also, I usually try and write around 2k chapters but idk this story has been running away from me and pulling the 4k chaps out so I hope that's okay :) I'll be moving over the next two weekends so I'm not sure they'll be quite as long, but I hope to stay on schedule and keep posting each week.
> 
> If you enjoyed please leave a kudos or drop a comment letting me know what you think! Even if it's a keysmash, it is much appreciated. Have a great week! <3


	3. Electricity: Part One

MJ kept contingency plans.

Maybe in a different life, she would have been a doomsday prepper. She could watch the apocalypse documentaries for hours- something about the hoarding and the planning and the certainty found in uncertainty was both overwhelming and awe-inspiring. And though she didn’t go as far as building her own bunker, MJ did like to be prepared. She knew what she would do if she got in a car accident (remain calm, take notes), if she ran into someone she knew from high school (pretend she had to get to a meeting), if she got a b in a class (drop out of college). Not all the plans had to be logical, they just had to be _there_. The doomsdayers didn’t have to have a logical solution to when the aliens came or when the apocalypse rained down from above. They just needed to have a solution. It was the action, the making of the plans, that was the important part.

MJ didn’t have a contingency plan for ‘When Your Ex-Boyfriend Shows Up on Your Doorstep After Years of No Communications Because He Has Been Under an Active Manhunt by People Who Not Only Want to Regulate Him because of His Mutant Status, but Also Because He Has Been Accused of Murder, Oh, Also You Watched Him Die on the News Three Months Ago, but Here He Is on Your Doorstep All The Same.”

She did, however, have a contingency plan for when there was no contingency plan. She was supposed to either a) excuse herself to go think of a plan or b) run.

She did neither.

Because she was nearly certain Peter Parker was standing right in front of her. And she couldn’t move. She couldn’t _move_ because this was Peter and he was everything and nothing all at once- he was the swirling mass of emotions inside of her she didn’t dare touch; he was the walls she had built up oh-so-carefully over the years to keep those feelings at bay. He was a thousand and one mysteries she had never solved; he was the knowledge she would never solve them. He was open arms and fresh-baked bread and _home_ ; he was a distant creature she barely recognized at all.

His eyes stared at her so intensely, so utterly unreadable. Who was this boy on her doorstep? But, no, regardless, she knew who she was. She was Michelle Jones. She needed to come back to the present. The boy standing in front of her was Peter Parker. He had asked her a question.

She couldn’t let herself be caught off guard. Not on her turf, not in her home, not on her goddamn welcome mat that said “Bienvenido!” on it. There was only one logical solution to this situation and it was coming to her now, it had taken her a moment, but it was back, her logical solution, and she knew she had to slam the door in “Ben’s” face and let him know it was stupid and surprising and so so foolish for him to just show up here, and that she needed him to get so far away from New York and ESU and this apartment that he never accidentally bumped against the fragile globe of her life again.

But. She couldn’t

And, with full knowledge that what she was doing was stupid, she smiled the biggest smile she’d ever smiled, swung the door open, and said, “Come on in!”

Devin gave her a look, perhaps acutely aware of how anti-Michelle she was acting, but let it slide as his eyes raked over Peter.

Though she had recognized him almost immediately, it was still shocking to see this boy wandering into her apartment. He was certainly not the Peter Parker who had left his home two years ago. Taller by an inch or two and more…full? It was as though he had grown into his gangly limbs just slightly. His hair was shorter, only the ghost of curls showing. He was full of more pointed edges- the cut of his jaw, the squared off nature of his shoulders, his hips down to his ankles.

But she would know his eyes anywhere. She knew them because they were his: warm and full of life, hope, of that dancing goofiness she’d missed so dearly. She knew them because they were hers: guarded, full of walls, a closed book. _Who were you, Peter Parker?_ She wanted to pull the answers from his chest. _Who did you become?_

He was hers, but a million miles away. “Hey, I’m Ben.” He lied comfortably, stepping through the doorway into their living room.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Devin.” Devin smiled, and Michelle could tell by his expression she was supposed to do the same.

“Michelle,” she said, and Peter locked eyes with her again.

She wished he would stop doing that.

It had been so terribly long. Something in his eyes offered a question, forgiveness, but she was so confused, she had a million questions, she didn’t know if he had answers, could answer, any of them. So instead she noticed the little things; the backpack slung over one shoulder, the rumpled t-shirt thrown over some jeans. It was plain black, no science pun. No text at all. She frowned and he reflexively took a step towards her. All she wanted was to rush forward and throw her arms around him and feel his solid shape; convince herself it was him, really him, here in the flesh.

But. She couldn’t.

She knew she couldn’t. Because Devin was here and she couldn’t risk anything and she didn’t know why Peter was here, maybe it was all a big mistake, maybe it wasn’t meant to be like this, maybe he hadn’t meant to show up to their apartment at all. Suck it up, Michelle. Game face on. And she could do it. She just needed to pretend like he was anyone else. A boy named Ben looking at their apartment for lease.

She cleared her throat. “Uh, you can feel free to look around.”

“Thanks.” His face pinked.

If Devin sensed the electricity vibrating between them, he didn’t say anything. He just dutifully listed off the various amenities of the apartment, the rent, where he could park, and so on.

But the words slipped out before MJ could stop herself. “So, what year are you at ESU?”

The tips of his ears flushed pink, but he didn’t flinch as he answered. “Actually, I’m just starting school.”

“You look older,” Devin smiled, and Michelle could practically see him giving Ben a hotness rating in his mind.

Peter shrugged and MJ knew she should drop it, but she couldn’t she just couldn’t, and it was his fault for all of his, he was the one doing this to her. “Why did you choose to come here?”

He didn’t stammer or blush as he looked her dead in the eyes. “I wanted a change of pace.”

“You come from a small town?” Devin asked.

“Something like that.” Peter shifted, looking down the hallway. “Can I see the bedroom?”

“Sure.” MJ was nearly jumping at the opportunity. “It’s right down this way.”

He trailed closely behind her in the hallway, and for a moment she swore his hand reached out towards hers. But she was too far ahead of him, just out of reach. She didn’t know if she was ready to have him touch her, anyway.

She did spin around and block his entrance for a moment in front of the spare bedroom door, whispering, “Did you know?”

He looked at her with those doe-wide eyes, still unreadable. “I-”

But Devin was pushing past them, opening the door to the room, ushering them both inside. “Do you like it? Pretty spacious, I think. For the price.”

Peter’s eyes glazed over the room, once, and MJ could tell he was not really looking. Something twisted in her stomach. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s great.”

She was standing so close to him she could see every individual baby hair scattered around the base of his neck, just above his shirt.

Devin gave him a thumbs up. “So, it’s a yes, then?” She could tell he liked Ben, and he wanted to secure a renter before the school year began.

“Um, well,” Peter took a step backwards, “I’ll have to think about it. Make sure it’s okay with…” his eyes caught hers, “everyone.”

“Okay.” Devin was nonplussed. “Well, I guess Michelle has your number, so you can just text her whatever you decide.”

“Oh, yeah.” He stared at her intently. “My data is sometimes sketchy, so I hope I’ll get everything.”

She found the double meaning: she needed to be careful about what she texted him. His number wasn’t safe. Did that mean he wanted her to contact him again? Was he ever really looking at renting a room at all?

But before she could ask him, he was retreating down the hall, thanking them for their time and wishing them a good weekend, and she couldn’t think of a reason, couldn’t think of an excuse for him to stay, couldn’t think of something to call out as he was leaving that wouldn’t reveal who he was or reveal who she was in some terrible terrible way.

So, she did what anyone else would do in her situation, she said, “It was nice meeting you!” as he walked out the door.

The minute it closed, she knew letting him go a second time would be a mistake.

She fixed mistakes.

Before she knew what she was doing, she had his old sweatshirt balled up in her arms and she was running out of the apartment, down the hall, past the elevator bank, racing down the stairs. She saw his head a few flights below and called out, “Ben!” because she didn’t make mistakes, not even when she was nervous and frayed and confused.

He froze, and his face was tender when he looked up at her.

He waited for her, on the third-floor landing of the grimy stairwell, and she had his sweatshirt out towards him, an offering. “You forgot this.”

His eyes were glittering with tears as he took it in, took her in. “I’m sorry.”

And she wanted to hug him so tightly his insides were squeezed, but she held back. “Not here, right?”

He took a step back, eyes scanning the area. “No,” he agreed, shaking his head. “Not here.”

“Did you know?”

And here was the only answer that mattered. “Yes.”

She breathed out in a huff. What did this mean? What did all of this mean? “But why?”

“Well.” He looked down at his shoelaces, as if they would give him answers. “I didn’t _know_ for certain. But the flyer said Michelle, and the number looked familiar. And I thought…well, I hoped.” He looked back up at her. “I didn’t think it was real, to be honest. There was a good chance it was all a trap. But I had to come and see.” He gave a half-laugh. “I didn’t have a plan besides knocking on the door.”

And some part of her understood. Because right now she felt frozen in the moment, sweating in her apartment stairwell. Boy and girl and sweatshirt between. Peter was here, living and breathing in front of her. It felt miraculous. It felt dangerous. The logical part of her was screaming one thousand and five questions. She could feel one thousand and five emotions bubbling up against her walls.

“Well, I-” the words were on her lips; she was ready to invite him back in. There were one thousand and five things she still didn’t know about him, but she would take him regardless. She was ready.

But his eyes tightened, just slightly, and her stomach twisted again.

She realized _his_ contingency plan.

“You’re not staying.”

He flinched, just barely. And she knew.

“You weren’t really trying to look at the apartment.”

He shook his head, and something not unlike venom spluttered through her veins, colored her words, “Say it.”

His voice was no louder than a whisper. “I can’t stay.”

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. She should have known. She should have known better. She should have _known_ better. And even the more stupid because she could feel the hurt spreading across her face, could feel those shocked, angry tears springing to her eyes, could feel her stomach twisting tighter. And she couldn’t hide it from him. The worst part of all.

“MJ-” He stepped towards her, but she danced away.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“I know.” His face was a wreck of emotion.

“How _dare_ you.” And there was the righteous anger. She was so good at being righteous. “How dare you come and mess with my life.”

He was standing opposite her now, both the boy she knew and the man she didn’t, and his hands were up, as if to show he was defenseless. But she knew better.

“I’m doing fine. I was doing perfectly fine. So, you don’t get to come in here, rummage around, and then leave before it gets messy.”

“That’s not-”

“No,” she pointed a shaky finger at him. “That is. This is to make _you_ feel better. Just like ‘my gift’ was.”

She threw the sweatshirt at him, and he watched it crumple into a pool at his feet. He didn’t make a move to pick it up.

And she was going to lose it oh god she was going to lose it but it couldn’t be in front of him she couldn’t break down in front of him right before he left again so she did the only thing she could do- “I don’t miss you. And I don’t want you in my life. So, just stay the fuck away from me.”

There was a whispered, “Okay.” And then he was gone in a flash. Gone before she could see his face, gone before she could hug him.

Gone just like the first time, without saying good-bye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay apologies for the two part chapter- this week has been CRAZY moving in/out of apartments so i figured i'd post the first half rather than wait until next weekend. 
> 
> thank you for all the support so far, it means the world! your comments have def made me even more excited to continue writing. have a great week <3


	4. Electricity: Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey everyone, trigger warning for some kind of self-harmy/dark thoughts as well as eating disorder actions in the first section of this chapter. if you want to skip it, i put in a section break in, so just skip to the part after the ********. the latter part also has light mentions of blood/bone, so please just take care of yourselves! <3

That night, she did something she hadn’t done for a long time.

It happened in steps, a specific unraveling. It struck her a moment after he left: she was free. She wouldn’t break down in front of him. It struck her a moment after he left: she was utterly alone again. She would break down and no one would be there to save her.

She was nothing more than a ghost. Drifting up the stairs, through the hallway, back to the door of her apartment, still ajar. In her haste, she hadn’t closed it all the way. A numb part of her registered opening the door again, seeing Devin’s shocked face staring at her.

She watched from afar as some version of Michelle crossed her arms and gave her best stone face to Devin. “Get out.”

But he wasn’t going to get out. He wasn’t even fully registering her words, sprawled on the couch, phone in one hand. He was confused she had left in such a flurry, but he didn’t care. He looked at her in the detached way you watched someone fight with their friend at a bus stop- drama that was intriguing because it didn’t affect you. He didn’t have to live with the weight, with the secrets, with the chaos.

“Get OUT!”

It was a screech she had never heard herself make before. She hadn’t even known she could produce that kind of noise. But this Michelle was fist clenched and shaking, and the words echoed, bounced around the small space.

“Michelle-” Devin was standing, moving towards her, but this wasn’t going to do, she needed him to leave, she needed him to leave, he couldn’t see her like this.

“No, no,” she pushed him away. “Just get out, get the fuck out.” But still, he hesitated, so she turned up the ice. “I said get out!”

And she had absolutely no right to tell him to leave, to vacate an apartment he paid for, but he did as she asked. Gathered up his things and left with wide-eyes. And she breathed out. And she was alone in the apartment.

She had no idea what to do.

She had no idea what to do with all these feelings.

A moment ago, she’d been filled with air, practically bursting at the seams. But instead of popping, she had just let all the air go out, and now there was a great yawning emptiness inside of her.

How did that happen?

How could she go from feeling everything to nothing in a matter of seconds?

Maybe that was her super power. Emotional restraint or the opposite of.

But the yawning emptiness was not emptiness at all, it was a tidal wave of hurt. A wrench in her gut, the smother of a pillow over her mouth and nose. It was inescapably sad, she was inescapably sad, but she didn’t feel the urge to cry. She didn’t even want to frown.

“Come on.” She sat down on the couch and screwed up her face. “Come on, just let it out. Just cry. Just do something.”

She put her elbows on her knees, digging in her weight until it hurt. “Come on. Come on. Your ex-boyfriend who you thought was dead just showed up and left within the span of like twenty minutes. He’s probably never coming back. You’re really sad. I know you are. So just cry. Cry while you’re all alone and you can.”

But she couldn’t summon any emotion.

She reached for anger. Anger at Peter, for disappearing again. Anger at Devin, for not knowing when to leave. Anger at herself, for pushing everyone away all the damn time. It was exhausting.

Maybe she should punch a wall. Be really angry and punch a wall.

So, she stood and faced the wall right next to the couch and summoned all her strength, but all she could give it was a firm rap. And it fucking hurt. But she was just so frustrated because she felt the scary something welling up inside her again, and if she could just let it out she’d be okay, but right now she was trapped, trapped in these feelings, beginning to draw in water and drown.

So she knew what she had to do.

She straightened her shoulders, walked into her bathroom, and vomited into the toilet until she didn’t have anything left inside of her at all.

So gloriously empty.

She lit a few candles in her bedroom. She drank the rest of a bottle of Nyquil she’d found rattling around under her sink. Wrapped herself up in a bunch of blankets and put on Netflix.

She didn’t shed a single tear.

********

The blare of a cell phone shocked her awake.

She felt like crap; sticky and with the hollow ache of emotion still wobbling in her chest. She didn’t usually leave the ringer on her phone, but she must have forgotten to turn it off before she’d fallen asleep.

She grappled for the device, squinting at the screen. She didn’t recognize the number, but her intuition was tingling. So, she answered.

“Hello?” She closed her eyes, scrubbing a hand over her face.

There was a bunch of static, the rustling of fabric over the speaker.

She felt an irrational surge of irritation. Maybe it was the 3:34 am timestamp. “Hello?” It was probably some telemarketer, and she couldn’t even be mad because she was the one who left her ringer on, and she was the one who had picked up the phone, and she was the one who had answered in the first place.

She was about to hang up. But Michelle Jones was good at watching. And she was good at listening and paying attention and remembering. And there was a tinny noise playing in the background of the other line, a song playing on loop, a diddy heard on calliopes, the kind that harkened back to summers spent running after ice cream trucks. And she recognized that noise, from where, she didn’t know, but she recognized it. So, she hesitated, she didn’t hang up.

“Hello?”

A response. Muffled. “Can I help you?” Nerves masked with careful politeness.

His voice.

“Peter?” But there was no answer. Just more rustling of fabric.

Muffled voices crackled through the speaker. Had she been pocket-dialed? Another voice, talking to Peter, but she couldn’t make out the words. Something felt off. She could hear the music jingling in the background, looping again and again, and it felt so familiar. For a moment, she could imagine Peter was calling her to say he was sorry and they should go get married and he had picked her up ice cream on his trip out.

The speaker jostled again, and Peter gave a quick, “I have to get going,” and she realized why this all was so off to her. He was scared. Why was he scared?

But the next words, from the second, deeper voice, were very clear. “Not so fast.”

A yell. The line went dead.

MJ sat bolt upright in her bed. She knew what she had to do.

Finding where he was should have been difficult.

Normally, she would have sat down and breathed out and thought about where he had gone and how far he could have gotten from her apartment since she’d last seen him and where it would make sense to look.

But she didn’t have time for thinking.

She threw on her glasses and hit the streets of New York in her oversized t-shirt, pajama pants, and tennis shoes, heart thumping wildly.

But she knew Peter- well, no, she didn’t _know_ Peter, she had _known_ Peter- and he moped around the city when he was upset. And she couldn’t get that stupid jingle, that song she’d heard over the phone out of her head. She wandered for a few blocks, fists clenched, head whipping from side to side, looking, looking, until it hit her. That stupid twenty-four-hour ice cream shop that played the obnoxious music all hours of the day or night. Some capitalistic marketing-ploy Instagrammable spot.

She took off running. The benefits of New York- no one looked twice at a girl running pell-mell through the streets at 3:37 am in Harry Potter pajama pants. She was no one. An odd sight, and nothing more. Just a blip in the universe.

The ice cream shop loomed before her; a mess of bright lights and loud music. How did she look, hair disheveled, Midtown’s Academic Decathlon t-shirt, and that steely glint of determination in her eyes? Maybe she could be someone’s Instagram picture instead.

But there was a thud to the alley on her right, a grunt of pain, and she saw a flash of brown hair, of Peter. There was another, larger man, coming at him, and though Peter was far from a poor fighter, he was still getting the shit beat out of him. She’d known it. She’d _known_ it.

She hesitated for a moment at the mouth of the alley. The large man smiled a wicked grin, grabbing Peter by his jacket. “You’re coming with me, Spider.”

Peter squeaked slightly as he was jostled from side to side, and though his arm twitched, MJ could tell he was in no condition to fight back. The large man sucker-punched him right to the face. Peter went limp.

She did the only thing she could think to do. She pepper-sprayed the guy right to the eyes.

He staggered backwards, yowling, and she yanked Peter into her arms. He stumbled towards her, looking tipsy, but she didn’t have time to worry if he was in a condition to be moved or what exactly she should do, she just tugged him and fled.

Though he could easily outrun her on any given day, the beating had slowed him down. She pushed their pace as much as she dared, guiding him down back streets and around dark corners. He kept up until they were a few blocks away from the alley.

“May,” he eventually spat, coming to a stop and heaving in some breaths. “May. We need to find her.”

He was cradling his arm, deathly pale and bloodied. She slowed slightly but didn’t stop moving. “What?”

“That guy,” he drew a deep breath, though it seemed to take a lot of effort, “he knew me. I don’t know what’s been compromised. I need to find May.”

She held out her hand. “Lead me.”

And he did.

They twisted and turned through New York in a way MJ had never thought possible, and she should have been concerned about the fact she had potentially made herself a criminal yet _again_ or that Peter looked about ready to keel over, but all she couldn’t stop spinning around the implication he was leading her to a safe house in the city. Had he been under her nose this whole time? In New York all those years, just a few streets away? Hidden just out of sight, around a corner she could never check?

He slowed, leading her under a rusted iron stairwell, next to an overflowing dumpster. She didn’t see the door concealed in brick before he placed his hand on the surface and it clicked open with an electronic hiss. Inside was a lavish apartment, the kind unguessable from the exterior. Fully furnished with a large living room, expansive kitchen, and couple of bedrooms. Certainly, a step up from her place. Did SHIELD have these houses all over the city? The country? Or was this the workings of Tony Stark, some kind of failsafe protection plan?

“Hello?” Peter’s voice echoed in the space. “May? Happy?” He wandered into the middle of the living room before turning to face her with wide-eyes.

“Maybe they knew something had happened, and they got out.” She tried for a reassuring tone, thought it seemed unlikely they would have left Peter in danger.

“Maybe.” His face was ruined with worry, and he cradled his arm tighter to his chest, swaying preciously. A lump was blossoming into a bruise above his eye, and his split lip still oozed blood down to his jaw.

“You need to sit down and rest,” she said, though it came out like a scripted line. Why was she so bad at being caring?

“M’kay.” He hit the couch hard. “Also. There’s this.”

He slid his jacket off, turning pale as a sheet in the process, and it was only then she saw his arm. The bone had broken through the skin, white bursting forth amidst a Pollock of blood.

“Oh my god.” Her vision swam. “Oh my god, Peter, oh my god, why didn’t you say something?”

He shrugged, then winced. “We were running. I was worried about May.”

“That’s a compound fracture,” her voice sounded wobbly, wavy, and she sat down next to him on wooden legs. “You need…you need surgery. There could be infection.”

“It’ll prob’ly heal,” he said in the least reassuring way possible. “Just need to pop it back into place.”

It was the popping back into place that was worrying her. His bone was sticking out of his arm and her head was spinning and spinning and there was a dark tunnel around her vision and-

“Are you okay? Maybe you should put your head between your knees.”

She looked at him through the dark haze. A hysteric laugh bubbled up from her chest. And once she had started laughing, she couldn’t stop despite it all, despite the fact it was the opposite of what she should be doing, despite the fact that Peter was staring at her in disbelief through her hazy vision.

“You’re the one scaring me now.” He pushed her head down and the spinning cleared slightly. “Why the hell are you laughing?”

And it was this question that sent her further off the edge. Because she was cackling now, giggling hysterically, and she could barely catch her breath to answer. “Peter.” She forced herself to sober slightly, to look him in the eyes. “I haven’t seen you in two years. You show up, you stick your fucking ulna through your skin, and yet I’m the one who nearly passes out. This is fucking ridiculous.”

He simply looked at her with those stupid brown eyes for a long moment and she waited for him to push her away, but something softened in his gaze and he started laughing too. They were just laughing, cackling into space at the sheer impossibility of it all, at the sheer chaos of it all. Her chest heaved until her breaths felt more like sobs but something about it was cathartic. A brief respite.

“Peter,” she asked him after she had recovered slightly, still fighting the odd giggle. “How the fuck are we going to fix your arm?”

He peered down at the wound. “I have no clue.”

“What if you just heal with it like that and then you can like…like, I don’t know, use it as a knife or something?”

He raised an eyebrow. “A knife of bone? Sticking out from my arm?”

“Exactly!” She mimed stabbing someone with her forearm. “It’s like, super badass that way.”

“Whatever you say,” he giggled. Now that they had been sitting for a moment, the bump on his forehead had faded to a bruise, the split lip nothing more than a thin line and some blood.

“Okay,” she breathed out. “We can’t do the hospital. We can’t call someone for help. We need to do this soon or you’re really going to have a knife arm and I don’t want that for you.”

“I’ll just-” he vaguely motioned with his arm, “pop it back in or something. It’ll be okay.”

“No. No.” She forced herself to look at the bone and blood more objectively. Deep breaths, in her nose, out her mouth. “I’ll help you. It might still be crooked though. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Whatever.” But he was picking at his lip nervously with his free hand. “Gotta get it back in somehow. Knife arm, right?”

“Right.” She squared her shoulders. “This is gonna hurt. Like. A lot.” She wished she didn’t sound so much like a teenage girl when she was sacred. But Peter didn’t seem to mind, he was holding his arm out towards her, trusting, and he needed her. Stupid sounding or not. “But we’re going to do it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

She got his wrist in one hand and elbow in the other, trying to ignore his gasps. “Don’t look,” she instructed, though she didn’t know whether she was talking to herself or to him.

And here was the thing about Michelle Jones- she stepped the fuck up. She couldn’t stand the sight of bone and gore but she sure as hell wasn’t letting Peter Parker walk around with a knife arm for the rest of his life. And she wasn’t stupid enough to think she knew how to reset a broken bone that had punctured skin. But she also wasn’t naïve enough to think someone else was going to do it for her.

So she said, “One, two-” And then she pushed and he screamed. It was shocking. It was one of the hardest things she had done. It was one of the easiest choices she had ever made. It was over. The bone was in his arm.

He fell against the cushions, looking faint, and she sat back next to him. Her hands were covered in his blood and she focused on taking deep breaths, it was going to be okay, deep breaths.

“Let’s never do that again,” Peter mumbled. His eyes were closed, but the color was returning ever so slightly to his cheeks. “Like. Ever.”

“Agreed.”

They were quiet for a few moments, her eyes drifting shut as well, and MJ thought of a million and five things she needed to do- dress Peter’s wound, figure out where May and Happy were, ask Peter what the fuck he’d been doing for two years- but she found she couldn’t speak. There was a certain contentment to this soap bubble of time. Peter’s warm body existing next hers, his pinky hooked around her own.

“MJ.” His voice was heavy with sleep.

She opened her eyes. “What? Do you need something? Does it hurt really bad?”

“No, I…” It seemed to take him a lot of effort to meet her gaze. “I just wanted you to know. I came back because I wanted to see you. I needed to see you again.”

His pinky curled around her own.

How many times had she imagined this moment? In fantasies, in daydreams she wouldn’t let herself finish. She’d seen him everywhere, around every corner, and now here he was, _wanting_ her. But he had wanted her before. She had walked this road.

“You’re very tired.” She cleared her throat and stood up, breaking their pinky link. “I’ll get some things to clean your arm.”

He let her go.

She had to leave the room before he could see her cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhhh these kids.
> 
> honestly i'm so happy to get a chapter up- i moved apartments for school last weekend and i'm currently about to drive down to Florida to do the disney college program so stuff has been CRAZY. 
> 
> hope everything is well w/y'all and please leave a kudos or let me know what you think in the comments! <3


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